Walking the streets of Manchester in 1870 ......... part 3 ........testing the story of dark secrets and awful tragedies in Wood Street

Now it is very easy to fall into the trap of using newspaper reports to draw a picture of the past.

And so far that is what I have done in the new series on walking the streets of Manchester in 1870.

As everyone knows, just yards from the broad and affluent main thoroughfares of the city, was another world where unless you were very poor you dared not venture.

Wood Street was one of those.

It was and is a narrow street off Deansgate and is best known for the Wood Street Mission which sought to provide basic support for the very poor.

The charity was established in 1869 and is still going today.

Its activities included running a soup kitchen, a rescue society and home for neglected boys, and a night shelter for the homeless.  It handed over thousands of clogs and items of clothing each year, as well as hundreds of toys at Christmas.

Around the Mission poverty not only busied its self but was pretty much what defined the street, and those newspaper reports dug deep into the squalor and human misery.

There were five articles published by the Manchester Guardian from February to March 1870 and they ranged over the back streets of Deansgate, across to Angel Meadow and up Market Street and down to London Road.**

The descriptions of awful living conditions, drunkenness and prostitution are as shocking to day as they were nearly 150 years ago.

And the reports are essential reading for those wanting to know more about living conditions amongst the very poor and in particular as a backdrop to the growing movement to care for the legion of abandoned, destitute and abused children.

But nothing should be taken at face value, which meant trawling the records to test how far the vivid descriptions matched reality.

The starting point as ever were the street directories which list householders and with names you can search the census returns to find the families which in turn will offer up information on occupations, the numbers of people living in each house and the density of housing.

Wood Street, 1849

And that data can be matched with maps of the area, making it possible to follow our journalist along Wood Street.

Not that it is that simple, because in 1870 the entire residents of Wood Street were not worthy of inclusion in the street directory which meant looking instead for the nearest properties on Deansgate, and using the name of the householder to visit the census return for the area.

43-49 Wood Street, 1903

Happily it paid off and just over half of the twenty pages of the particular census return were for Wood Street.  In total there were 276 people living in forty four properties, many of which were in closed courts off Wood Street and accessed by dark narrow passages.***

Some of the courts had names like Smith’s Court, Bradley Court and Pilkington’s while others didn’t even rate a name.

Most of the properties were back to back and consisted of just two rooms and will have been in various states of repair.

And at random I fastened on the Ellis family who lived at number 3 Robinson’s Court which was at the western end of Wood Street hard by a Hide and Skin Yard.

The court was accessed through one of those narrow passages off Wood Street and in turn led off to another and unnamed court.

Robinson's Court, 1849

Robinson’s Court would have been dark, admitting little sunshine or fresh air and its occupants would have had daily to cope with the smell of the Hide and Skin Yard, just yards away.

Mr Thomas Ellis was a stone mason’s labourer, aged 33 from Manchester.

His wife Mary had been born in Dublin and was a silk winder.

Together with their four children they occupied the two rooms which made up number 3.

No photographs exist of their home but by exploring the rate books we know that they paid one shilling a week and that their landlord was John Highams who owned all six properties in the court.

33 & 35  Wood Street, 1903

A further search of the rate books will reveal the extent of Mr Higham’s property portfolio and by finding out just how much Mr Ellis earned it should be possible to judge how significant that shilling was to the family budget.

What is interesting about Wood Street is the number of lodging houses which according to the article were at the bottom end of the market with overcrowding being the norm and some verging on “vice shops.”****

I think it may be impossible now to ascertain how accurate was the journalist’s observation of “drunken women standing about the doorway, or coming in with some drunken man whom the gin shops of Deansgate have half maddened.”****

But I suspect the discovery of a group of women in another house is all too true.  “On the knees of the centre figure of this strange group lies a little month-old baby, dying-the last of twins.  It is miserably thin and the yellow skin shows the articulation of its frame.... the eyelids are drawn close down, and a long bony arm weakly and painfully raises itself.”****

One of the courts off Wood Street, 1903

We will never know the identity of any of the group or the final fate of the child, but a few days later the mother had taken refuge in the most debased of lodging houses.

Today Wood Street is still narrow, the Mission building is still there but as for the rest it has long ago vanished.

Location; Manchester, 1870







Pictures; Wood Street, 2007, from the collection of Andrew Simpson, numbers 43-49, 1904, m05386,numbers 33 &35, m05389, backs of numbers 33 & 35 m05391, A Bradburn courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass  and Wood Street, 1849, from Manchester & Salford OS, Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/

*Walking Manchester in 1870

**In the Slums, Manchester Guardian, March 3 1870

***Wood Street, from the 1871 census, Enu 2, 9-20, Deansgate, St Mary’s

****In the Slums, Manchester Guardian, March 3 1870

The Romans really were in Well Hall .... 1,900 years ago

The discovery of what could be the remains of a Roman hypocaust system has been uncovered in an archaeological dig in the back garden of a house in Well Hall.

Elena Verdi of the 'Istituto di antichità classica di Napoli, announced this morning that "the find is very significant and raises the possibility that this was part of a villa complex or even the bathhouse of a previously unknown Roman military establishment".

BREAKING NEWS

It can now be revealed in advance of the press conference to be held in Naples at the offices of the Istituto di antichità classica di Napoli at midday, that the remains discovered in the garden of a Well Hall house are not Roman.

A saddened Elena Verdi, will announce that her team were a little hasty in their conclusions.  "I think we were all too excited by a metal box inscribed with an advert in Latin for 'Mario's take away fish paste', and in retrospect concede the remains appear to be an early 20th century  black pudding mine, which were known to be extensive in the Well Hall area at the time."

It is also believed she has withdrawn the souvenir plastic models of Roman soldiers carrying the inscription. "Visit Well Hall and take a break from all that conquering" which were found at the dig site.

Location; Well Hall

Picture; the remains, 2019 courtesy, Istituto di antichità classica di Napoli

Lost Tudor home found in Chorlton ..............

Now there are many myths, and half-truths about both Hough End Hall and Barlow Hall which circulate and pop up for debate from time to time.

The young Henry VIII, 1530-35

The most persistent are the tunnels which are supposed to connect the two, along with another which runs from the Horse and Jockey on the Green to the site of the old church.

So, the story goes they were dug during the Reformation and Counter Reformation as an escape route during religious persecution, while the pub tunnel allowed expensive and illegal casks of French brandy to be stored in the vaults of the church during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

Of course, they are total tosh.  The residents of Barlow Hall were Catholics and those of Hough End Hall were Protestants and so hardly likely to conspire in challenging which ever form of Christianity was official during the 1540s into the 1590s, and neither the old St Clements nor its later replacement had a vault.

But it now turns out that there maybe more than a little truth in the story that Henry VIII had a hunting lodge somewhere close to the western side of Chorlton Park.

A chance find in the Royal Library of a book listing where the King visited during his Royal Progresses suggests that in 1539 on a trip to the North he commissioned the construction of a grand lodge close to an unnamed stream near what is thought to be Barlow Moor Road.

The building predates the second Hough End Hall which was built just over fifty years later and may have used some of the timbers and glass from the King’s house.

Sadly, nothing now remains of the lodge according to Eric Thistlewaite who was a superintendent at Manchester Parks and Recreational Grounds [retired]. He confirmed that prior to the laying out of Chorlton Park in the 1920s an extensive programme of digging in the location had found nothing.

Hough End Hall, 1849, all that is left of Henry's hunting lodge?

The most plausible explanation for the lack of any evidence is the simple one, that the lodge would have been made of prefabricated units which were assembled on site, and sometime in the mid-1590s Queen Elizabeth sold off everything including the fittings, furniture, and the fabric of the building to recoup losses made during the costly battle to defeat the Spanish Armada.

But the presence of the lodge has led  Mrs Trellis of Sandy Lane to call a meeting to petition King Charles to honour the township with the prefix Royal.  “I think” she said “it would be a great honour to live in the Royal Township of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, and who knows one day we may even be able to find out who the King entertained in his lodge, which I believe would have been just before his ill-fated fourth marriage”.

The exact location and time of tonight’s meeting has yet to be announced.

Location; Chorlton

Picture; Henry VIII, circa, 1530-37, by Joos van Cleve,   Royal Collection RCIN 403368, and Hough End Hall in 1849, from The Family Memoirs, Sir Oswald Mosley, 1849

Will Didsbury lose its name?

There is a growing interest in renaming the old township of Didsbury.

Saxton's map of Lancashire, 1577

The smart money is on that older spelling of Diddesbury which appears on Saxton’s map of 1577.

This would be more accurate, and some have argued would lend greater gravitas to our suburb, be more in line with its historical origins and be a powerful marketing ploy to attract tourists from China, the Sub-Continent and the powerful economies of south east Asia.

The cost of changing to the new name would be outweighed by interest from Tourist Boards and travel companies looking for somewhere new to sell holidays to families who are tiring of places in the sun and overcrowded and expensive destinations.

But a small and vociferous group have gone further and would prefer to see the name eliminated from all maps, road signs and official documents in favour of Northenden and Barlow Moor.

Mr. Renfrew of the Ancient Association of Topographical and Projectionists said at their annual meeting, “Too long have we laboured under the name of Didsbury, and it is time to shake off the vestiges of the clinging past and be ‘bloody, bold and resolute’.  

To this end we want the rehabilitation of the names Barlow Moor and Northenden.  We support the division of Didsbury into two self-governing entities on the model of the old Scottish Burgh.  We would leave the actual division of Didsbury and the new boundaries between Barlow Moor and Northenden to a Convocation of the Good and Wise”

We shall see

Location; Barlow Moor and Northenden

Picture; extract from Saxton’s map of Lancashire, 1577, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/ 

Rediscovering our recent past the Coldharbour Estate in Eltham sometime in the 1950s

I rather think that we often overlook our most recent past.

There was one history teacher of mine at Samuel Pepys Secondary Modern School who maintained that if wasn’t at least a hundred years old it didn’t class as history.

Now I know what he was getting at but that ignores so much of ore recent past, a past still vivid in the memories of many people.

So today I have decided to look at the Coldharbour Estate some of which will have clocked up sixty-six years of history which makes it older than even me.

The estate is “a large and spacious estate developed on the site of the Coldharbour Farm by the Metropolitan Borough of Woolwich from 1947.  It is sliced in two by a major road, William Barefoot Drive, where the small shopping centre and community buildings are located.

The estate was planned as a ‘garden suburb’, and there are many attractive greens.  From the open space at the Court there is a magnificent view of Eltham Lodge.”*

And there is the St Albans Church, “a small red brick church designed by Ralph Covell in 1953 it has a nice square tower and gently bowed window, and is linked by an arcade to the original vicarage.”*

The estate was not some where I knew well but only because none of my friends lived there so I had no reason to visit it, and when you are sixteen there are far more interesting places that call you over.

So I never went and now forty-seven years on and 230 miles further north I guess I won’t.
But that is not to say I have ignored the place.

Like many other post war developments it was a part of that determined effort to provide decent housing in pleasant surroundings.

And Coldharbour must have been significant enough a place to warrant a set of postcards by Tuck and Sons Ltd.

My favourite is the one of Witherstone Way mainly because of what was written on the back which announces that “The HOUSE MARKED X IS MY HOUSE. La maison c’est chez moi”

It has been dated to 1976 but the card must be older and is in that tradition of local communities getting their own visual record of what they were like, along with that even older habit dating back to the beginning of post card of marking the spot where you lived.

And reminds us that once the image had been created the company continued using it despite the fact that by 1976 the cars and the fashions had moved on a full twenty years if or more.

Pictures; Witherstone Way and St Albans Church and the Mound, courtesy of TuckDB, http://tuckdb.org/postcards

*Spurgeon Darrell, Discover Eltham, 2000

When nostalgia gets it wrong

Historically there may have been a time when Beech Road was empty of parked cars, vans and scooters.

Beech Road, 1979

And lots of people will tell you that they remember just such a time.

But you will have to go back a long time.... perhaps to sometime just after the last war or one Sunday before the arrival of the Beech Road bar and coffee culture.

And even then  you might be hard pressed to find the entire road from the Rec down to the Green totally empty.

For proof here is Beech Road in 1979. 

I have no idea now what day or what time but busy it was.

And that offers up a corrective to all those who remark that there were no cars then when seeing an old photograph.

That advert seen on the side of Walker's barn, the Green, 1979 

In the same way lets not pretend that street adverts were any better all that tme ago.

Neither photograph is the best, but then the negatives sat in our cellar for over 40 years, and were taken when I was just begining to snap away.

But they make the point.

And let's not forget that on Friday and Saturday the overflow from the Irish clun stretched along Cross Road, Beaumont Road and Beech Road.

Location; Chorlton, 1979

Pictues; Beech Road and a poster, 1979, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Walking the streets of Manchester in 1870 ......... part 2 ........Deansgate and Davenport’ Court "where scarcely a night passes but some robbery is committed”

Now I have to say the stretch of Deansgate from St Mary’s Gate down to Victoria Street Bridge is dismal.

Looking up Deansgate from Victoria Bridge Street, 1988

It starts with that Italian restaurant but pretty quickly becomes just a wall behind which rises that sloping walkway which now goes nowhere.

And the end of that dismal stretch is just the entrance to a car park.   All very different from the impressive Grosvenor Hotel and the Grosvenor Buildings which occupied the same spot but were demolished in 1972.

A full century earlier and the same site was home to the notorious Davenport Court where according to the Manchester Guardian “scarcely a night passes but some robbery is committed ........ and almost under the shadow of the Cathedral tower.”*

The Grosvenor Hotel, 1959

The court was one of those enclosed ones and “entered only by a narrow passage some four or five feet wide.

At the end of this are two houses, used for the most vicious of all trades, and of course registered as common lodging house.”

It was “well known in the police courts and goal.  

Yet for all these houses are still continued on the register as being well ordered, and go on nightly adding to the long calendar of crime and filling the lock wards of our hospitals.” 

Lock hospitals specialized in treating sexually transmitted diseases,

Ours had opened in 1819 and was replaced a by newer one which opened in 1874 off Liverpool Road, on the corner of Duke Street and Bridgewater Street, and while it postdates the Manchester Guardian description it is worth noting that a decade later it was so strapped for cash that “its walls still remain unpainted.”

But according to Mr Lowndes its “doors are always open in the first instance to anyone suffering from the disease for which it treats, but in order to prevent abuse, and to reserve its benefits for the most deserving, no patient is admitted a second time.”**

One wonders where some of those who needed its services a second time went, not that the journalist from the Manchester Guardian.

Davenport Court, 1849

Instead he continued to paint a vivid if depressing picture of life in Davenport Court, referring to one resident “seated by the kitchen fire of one of these houses who was a low browed short haired man, whose muscles and ferocity seemed well matched and who boasted that he ‘never did a day’s work this many a year, and should consider himself a fool,” with a very appropriate adjective ‘if he did.’”

And there was plenty of evidence of violent behaviour and criminal acts upon those who might stray into the court.  Such victims could not expect any help even though they might cry out and were unlikely to catch their assailant who being familiar with the court could vanish in an instant and be out on Deansgate mingling with passersby.

Added to which “at the corner of the entry. Keeping guard over it is a public house filled full to overflowing with wholly drunken men and semi-drunken women, and hard working labourers who are spending on prostitutes hard-earned money for want of which their wives and children are starving at home. 

Davenport Court and surrounding area, 1849

The whistle which gives token of the approach of suspicious-looking strangers, and the intense silence which succeeds it, indicate alike the commerce and the conversation carried on there.

The intruding and unwelcome visitor is greeted with muttered curses and regarded with furtive looks; he may be a ‘plain-clothes man’ taking stock, and too many know what that means to make his advent welcome.”

The pub was the Llangollen Castle which stood directly north of the court and the area was dominted by textile mills, metal working plant and timber yard.


Of course it may well be that our journalist for all sorts of reasons may have over egged the situation, but I doubt it for there are plenty of similar accounts.

That said I shall away and away and trawl the records for any reference to unruly behaviour in the pub and the court.

Victoria Street, 1988

Location; Deansgate

Coming soon; dark secrets and tragedies in Wood Street






Pictures; Victoria Street, 1988, E. Krieger, m 05447, Grosvenor Hotel and the Grosvenor Buildings, L. Kaye, 1959, m49730, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass  and Davenport Court, 1849, from Manchester & Salford OS, Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/

*In the Slums, Manchester Guardian, March 3, 1870

**Lock Hospitals and Lock Wards in General Hospitals, Frederick W. Lowndes, 1882, pages 12-14